Word-renown Japanese female artist whose large scale retrospective had been hosted by Tate Modern this spring, Yayoi Kusama, and Louis Vuitton have a collaboration to create funky Luis Vuitton and Yayoi Kusama Collection. Celebrating the collection, the windows of Selfridges on Oxford street are covered with the artist’s iconic polka dots together with her poem “Love Foerver”, as well as large & small figures of Kusama, and of course, Luis Vuitton bags and clothing. This is an UK exclusive and the largest store collaboration to date (Selfridges website). Above the main entrance of the department store, a 13-feet tall giant fibreglass statue of the artist overwhelms pedestrians (Selfridges website). Her figures look a bit scary…

A Japanese contemporary artist, well-known for her repeating dot patterns, Yayoi Kusama‘s retrospective “Yayoi Kusama” is currently running at Tate Modern until June 5th. The exhibition gathers her artworks over 60 years of her career in variety of media, including painting, drawing, collage, film, sculpture, performance art and installations. Kusama is the second known Japanese female artist in UK, after late John Lennon’s soul mate, Yoko Ono. Kusama came to UK on the opening of the show, and appeared all in red, not just red but bright red – red bob cut and the same red dress with big white dots (the Guardian article).

Kusama’s works are characterized by compulsion, repetition, and rhythmicity in a wide variety of mediums. In the exhibition, you see Accumulation sculptures such as phallus-covered Sex Obsession series (the second photo) and Food Obsession, consisting of objects covered with dry macaroni; Walking Piece, a series of colour slides with Kusama wearing a bright pink kimono walking the streets of New York; Self-Obliteration (YouTube Part 1 / part 2), a film documented her Body Festivals in 1967, in which naked participants were painted with brightly colored polka dots, along with images of her paintings and installations; large multi-part installations such as The Clouds and Accumulation sculptures; recent paintings with repeating motifs of eyes, flowers, hieroglyphic self-portrait in profile, and dots in an intense bright colours (second bottom photo); and mesmerising Infinity Mirror Rooms (bottom photo) that concludes the show.

Born in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, she developed her passion for art from a young age, but at the same time started to suffer neurotic and obsessional symptoms. She studied Nihonga painting but was frustrated by its conventionality, and started to teach herself about the European and American avant-garde from books and magazines. After her certain success in Japan, she decided to go to New York, center of the art world, in 1957, leaving Japan where is “too small, too servile, too feudalistic and too scornful of women.” Kusama came into contact with renown artists including Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Cornell. She established herself as a prominent contemporary artist, with an identity of “outsider”, both as an Asian and as a woman in a male-dominated Western art world. In 1973, she returned to Japan in ill health. As an age of 82, she commutes to her studio from a mental institution where she lives and calls ‘home’ , and still work vigorously. Her obsessiveness in making art is largely coming from a desire to escape from psychological trauma, and art seems to be very therapeutic to her. →reference: LOUIS VUITTON×Yayoi Kusama site

Kusama’s life is more intriguing than her works for me. Her vitality and strength that helped her survive the tough period when the status of women and ethnic minority is subordinate, and made herself the most prominent female artist in Japan, is truly exceptional and amazing. However, the exhibition doesn’t succeed to fully express her power and intensity, unfortunately.